Vocabulary and Grammar Differences Between Deaf and Hearing Students

Abstract

The present study investigated the development of literacy skills of deaf and hard-of-hearing (DHH) children in Japan. The three components of literacy, vocabulary, orthographic knowledge, and grammatical knowledge were assessed by using the subtests of the Adaptive Tests for Language Abilities (ATLAN), based on the item response theory developed by the authors). The participants consisted of 207 DHH children (first through twelfth grades) in Study 1, and 425 hearing children (first through sixth grades) in Study 2. The findings show that more than 80% of DHH children's vocabulary variance was explained by the other two componential skills, while the three tasks' difficulty was different. More specifically, their vocabulary and especially, their grammar lagged behind those of hearing children, whereas the difference between the two groups on kanji (one of the three orthographic systems in Japanese taught during the school years) was less. Although considerably delayed, their pattern of responses in grammar was similar to that predicted from normative data. Effective instruction for DHH children's literacy skills was generally discussed.

Deaf Children of Hearing Parents Have Age-Level Vocabulary Growth When Exposed to American Sign Language by 6 Months of Age

“…4,5,[46][47][48][49][50][51][52][53] With few exceptions, 54,55 deaf and hard of hearing children generally have smaller spoken English vocabularies than age-matched hearing peers. [56][57][58][59][60][61][62][63][64][65][66][67][68][69][70][71] ASL exposure seems to be a more reliable means of developing age-expected vocabularies than interventions focused on spoken English.…”

The current situation and characteristics of the language abil-ity of hearing-impaired children in China

“…The scores of hearing-impaired children in literacy are generally low, and individual differences are large. In 'Vocabulary and Grammar Differences between Deaf and Hearing Children', Takahashi et al (2017) compared to the difference in literacy between hearing-impaired children and hearing children; and the difference between individual hearingimpaired children was larger. The literacy score of this study agrees with the results of previous studies.…”

Textual construction of the hearing-impaired students’ recount texts: A case of students with special needs in writing to mean

“…From the examples above, the low achiever students tended to use a predicator as a topical theme in a declarative clause. It signals that low achiever students had a problem in structuring a grammatically correct sentence, which, therefore, may be related to the argument that the vocabulary and the grammar of the hearing-impaired students are inevitably low (Cannon & Kirby, 2013;Takahashi et al, 2016;Zamani et al, 2018). The use of marked topical themes may attract someone's attention for their distinguished intention in sentences.…”